I just answered a question on the Joomla forums which I thought I should post here because I find myself using this trick fairly often and many others must have this problem but not know the secret.

Sometimes you are trying to assign a template but it just doesn't assign properly. I think something gets messed up somewhere and so you can just simply not assign any templates to menu items anymore. I have a quick fix for it.

1. Change the default template to some other template that you don't want as your default
2. Edit your default template by clicking its name
3. Click the radio button "Select from List"
4. Select all the items in the list - an easy way to do this is by clicking the first item, hold down shift, then click the last item
5. Click Save to save the menu assignments
6. Now set it as your default template again by selecting the radio button to the left of its name and clicking Default at the top right of the screen

Now you should be able to assign other templates to menus properly again. If not then you may have to play around some more by assigning some templates to all menus and saving and then assigning them to none and saving. I think somehow something gets mucked up and just has to be refreshed like this in order for it to work properly again.

Lately I have been getting lots of emails on some sites registering that are spam. Even with all my things to try to prevent it that I have tried it is an ongoing battle and you have to always be ready to stop it. I decided I wanted to block all emails from mail.ru from registering since they seem to be spam usually but I didn't know how to do that. So I figured I would track down a way and eventually found myself in the Joomla forums.

I discovered a post by SundanceKid on how to ban certain email domains from registering. Thank you!

I modified it slightly so it didn't have yahoo or gmail in it. I also changed the error message below to be less obvious because I figured if they know its the email domain causing the error they will probably just try another one. But if they do this you can add another one to block by copying one of the lines in the middle of the code below and modifying it with the new domain.

Please post comments of any domains you find that are known to be spam and I will add it to the list for future use.

I was thinking that maybe there is some better way to do this by hooking it to some sort of database that probably already exists out there but this is good for now since all I really wanted to do is block mail.ru.

File: components/com_user/controller.php
Line: 266 (may differ per Joomla release)

  // ##### BEGIN: SPAM DOMAIN FILTER #####
  // Kick out spam domains
  $email = $user->get('email');
  if ( strpos($email,"gawab.com") ||
  strpos($email,"mail.ru")  ||
  strpos($email,"list.ru")  ||
  strpos($email,"bk.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"minivds.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"nakgirls.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"yandex.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"info1a.cn") ||
  strpos($email,"gooogletartsert.net") ||
  strpos($email,"freemeilaadressforall.net") ||
  strpos($email,"goodemailadressforfree.net") ||
  strpos($email,"5opicforum.cn") ||
  strpos($email,"pozitifff.com") ||
  strpos($email,"2008bases1.net") ||
  strpos($email,"nm.ru") ||
  strpos($email,"goldwoof.net") ||
  strpos($email,"megapochta.cn") ||
  strpos($email,"meta.ua") ||
  strpos($email,"fene4ek.net") ||
  strpos($email,"mail15.com") ||
  strpos($email,"googlemail.com") ||
  strpos($email,"yandex.com") ||
  strpos($email,"inmail24.com") )
  {
  JError::raiseWarning('','Error');
  $this->register();
  return false;
  }
  // ##### END: SPAM DOMAIN FILTER #####

Joomla Template SEO Techniques

This guide was originally written for Joomla 1.0 but could be interpretted to later versions of Joomla.

I am seeing many people mention that SEO is in the hands of the Joomla template designer. Well being a Joomla template designer I can definitely see what you are talking about and it is true to an extent. However it still has very much to do with the core of Joomla itself, the components and modules and how they are all coded since they will be displayed through the template. It is a group effort and that is what Joomla is all about.